There are many reasons dir getting hit by Premium ammo:
- You weren't the expected target. the other was planning in hitting Something heavy armored.
- The other over estimated your Armor
- The other has nö Idea about Penetration mechanics
- the other one wants top Gunmark his Tank
- the other one is driving a Tag k with Stock fun or low penetration in General

Always load prems in my EVEN. Got about 1/3 prems in my 1357 and 1375. If I run dry on standards prems is to be used ofc. And if going in for a "full health need to clip enemy down good" I also load prems due to circling tactics.

And tbh, I do not mind getting penned by prems in my lights, due to the fact that standards would have penned me anyway - might as well drain the enemy of credits.

A third example are tier 8 premium tanks that have 175 pene as standard. With the power creep in the game these tanks really cant cope with tier 9's so always use gold in these to make them more competitive. Again an exmaple T-34-3 and WZ-111.

Where gold ammo provides such an advantage I always load gold and simply don't bother with anything else.

There are the exceptions though as I usually use standard apcr. When you have been playing for 6 years like I have you really should know where the weaknesses are.

As mate of mine once said if you can give yourself an extra 2% or 3% of winning why wouldn't you use gold.

It seems that whenever I play a thin skinned vehicle, I find myself getting hit by a ton of premium APCR for seemingly no reason.

Does everyone just load premium straight away and not switch?

i dont use it, hence why my stats are ****. If WG balanced tanks/armor properly there wouldnt have been any need for premium ammo in the game but greed made them do it. Now they have messed up so many tanks with having it in the game, it would be like starting again to remove it fully.

Does firing premium against no armour help with this? I have gun marks and never fire premium O.o

Yes, not directly, but indirectly, if you load only premium ammo (at least APCR) you most of the time only see the benefits, if you in your paper tank rolls by why spend time reloading a normal shell? By the time you've reloaded you're most likely no longer a valid target or you've put one ore more shoots into the tank currently reloading, or even worse, both.

As an example, yesterday I was fighting an Defender and an VK 100.01 P on the banana road on Himmelsdorf in my T29, I had premium ammo loaded, a Skorpion G appeared and I placed a premium shell into him. I could of course have spent about 10 seconds + my reaction time reloading an HE shell, but by that time I would have had to fire it at something else since the Skorpion G would be behind cover, that wouldn't exactly help me get gun marks if I was going for that.

Does firing premium against no armour help with this? I have gun marks and never fire premium O.o

It dosen't matter. And this is not a complaint. It just makes me frown and wonder why people should still be making profit while flinging these rounds everywhere.

It's not as black and white as people make it seem.

A person might load gold ammo not necessarily for the "garunteed penatration". Tanks like the SU-100Y actually sacrifice pen for increased damage output with its premium shells. There are more other examples and reasons why gold is seen flying around than meets the eye.

It makes you frown. OK. Sure, there are certain behaviours that are annoying to all players and we all have our views on the subjects but the common denominator is that everyone wants to win. We do this by exploring to the maximum the mechanics available to us all, within the rules. Part of that is what makes premium ammunition needed.